


This Cage I Built With Good Intentions

by scriggly



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Bearding, M/M, POV Jensen Ackles, POV Second Person, Protective Jensen, non-au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-27 21:30:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6301153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scriggly/pseuds/scriggly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's getting harder, not easier. Between your bitter rage at the façade and the constant what-ifs that plague you, half-formed visions of any number of other paths you could have walked where you could reach for him without a second thought, bend him backwards in a sloppy kiss whenever he opened that pretty pink mouth, whenever other people's lust touched him (always so astounded by his beauty in person, and you want to snarl at them to pick up their jaws off the floor, half-smug and half-seething in jealous protectiveness), it feels like you're swallowing bile all the time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Cage I Built With Good Intentions

**Author's Note:**

> Title borrowed from Stone Temple Pilots.
> 
> WARNINGS: Personal reflections on depression. Also, if you're repulsed by mouth-to-mouth swapping of chewing gum and glorification of spit, this is not the fic for you. Finally, if you dislike Danneel or Genevieve, this is not the fic for you.
> 
> Angst. No plot. Only fleeting hints of flashback smut. Basically just a self-indulgent imagining of what goes on in Jensen's head. Unspecified public setting (candid or non-candid public appearances, cons, or elsewhere).

Your palms ache.

You keep your gaze on the flashing cameras in front of you, but you can see him there in profile out of the corner of your eye, at the far end of the handful of people squeezed between you, next to _her_. The sweet music of his laugh floats over the din to graze your ears and heat your blood. He hunches down and yet stays head and shoulders above everyone else, tucks her head under his chin. A cascade of glossy, silky curls tumbles forward and settles calmly on the top of her head, a vicious punch to your solar plexus.

You should stop sneaking glances at him in between snaps of the myriad cameras in front of you. (Why does she light up like a Christmas tree while you're all selling it? Why can't you stop resenting the act she has to keep up?) Her tiny hand comes around his waist (his waifish, slender waist that only fits perfectly encircled in your hands). More smiles, more laughter from everyone. Your smile digs shards into your cheeks. She looks up at him, this slip of a girl who's not in it for the money, who gave you your two precious walking, breathing pieces of _him,_ and brushes a silky strand off his forehead, and your vision goes red (but if not the money, then what? What?).

His stolen glances at you sear your skin, until your gazes meet and burning want drags its red-hot teeth up and down your veins.

If you could just _touch_ him.

God, how your palms ache.

But your pose is perfect and your smile's in place and your gaze is fixed on the nonstop camera flashes. Your good friend (your own half of the charade, brave and clever just like the beautiful little girl she gave you and him) nudges your elbow with hers, covert and encouraging, and you nod and stuff your hands in your jeans pockets. It doesn't quell the ache, but it stops you stretching your arm just that tiniest bit further, knowing that he'll sense it and find his way towards you, close enough for you to sling an arm around his shoulders as casually as you can muster, pull him just that slightest bit closer.

It takes no time at all, these days – just a few minutes forbidden from touching him and you're already chafing against invisible shackles.

Posing's over and you sneak another glance at him. She's waiting for your gaze, genuine sympathy in her eyes only for you to decipher. Your apology is silent but equally genuine – you of all people should know what it's like, shyness interpreted as arrogance, privilege assumed to exempt you from human pain. You of all people should know about flawless acts and jaws that grind throughout them.

But you can't stand any hands on him, anyone's touch that isn't yours, and you can't stand being forbidden to stake your claim, your joy, your pride in him and your shared love and your shared pain and the life you've both carved out with blood and tears in this filthy, fickle world. (Haven't you earned it?) Your palms are itching and you can't help seeking him out with your eyes in between cursory, safe glances everywhere else, lingering on him over and over in pretend casualness, meager sustenance that does nothing to calm your fire.

Until he's finally within arm's reach, and you welcome the request for a picture of just you two and try not to curl your fingers around his neck too desperately as you pull him closer and smile, his arm a warm, equally desperate weight around your shoulder.

It's getting harder, not easier. Between your bitter rage at the façade and the constant what-ifs that plague you, half-formed visions of any number of other paths you could have walked where you could reach for him without a second thought, bend him backwards in a sloppy kiss whenever he opened that pretty pink mouth, whenever other people's lust touched him (always so astounded by his beauty in person, and you want to snarl at them to pick up their jaws off the floor, half-smug and half-seething in jealous protectiveness), it feels like you're swallowing bile all the time.

***

Shackles in place once again, an appropriate (hateful) distance between you. You encourage squeals and laughter and pretend he's not a shimmering glow in your awareness all the time. You let a genuine smile carry your gratitude for all of this for a few moments, turn it a beat longer on those gazing at him in adoration and warming your heart, then effortlessly play up your grumpy smile to his unaffected frisky-puppy chaos.

Beautiful chaos, your beautiful boy, restless elegant fingers and fidgety long legs unable to stand still or sit still, soft, soft locks tumbling and bouncing all over his eyes and ears and neck. You turn your hungry eyes on him, a few fortifying seconds to drink in that boyish beauty.

Under your gaze he's radiant, long column of his neck bared and glistening with his sweat (your mouth is _so_ dry; if you could just lap up those sweet, sweet drops) as he throws his head back and laughs, lights and camera flashes dancing in his hair. He shoves up his shirtsleeve to bare an obscenely beautiful forearm and spreads those endless legs to straddle his chair. You dig your fingers in silent viciousness into your pockets again and wrench your eyes away, hold yourself ramrod straight and stiff around the hot curl of want licking your insides and forcing your thighs wide open.

His gaze follows you, worshipful and loyal and puppy-eager. Just a matter of minutes until you helplessly look back, but you brace yourself first, because it always, _always_ knocks the breath out of you.

Because four years' difference doesn’t warrant the reverent adoration and outright _deferent_ awe flashing in those beautiful eyes, the unwavering trust he has in you, your beautiful boy.

Nor does it warrant the way you ache to wrap him up in your arms, to shield every precious inch of him with your body, because only then are your fears silenced and you can stop gagging on all the ugly scenarios crawling in your head, cars speeding, planes crashing, pistachios going down the wrong pipe, viruses and shootings and danger, so much danger in the very air he breathes, this beautiful boy who is utterly vital and _necessary_ for your own lungs to keep working.

Another sweet laugh as he clowns around, his gaze on you and his antics entirely for you, and your eyes helplessly seek him out again. Naked relief in his beautiful eyes as your gaze hungrily caresses the graceful line of his jaw, his nose, the kitten-pink tongue peeking out as his lips hug each vowel and consonant like a little boy learning to talk (you can't help licking your lips; you're so thirsty for that sweet, sweet strip of stubbled skin above that perfect upper lip - _Jesus_ ). He throws his long limbs all over the place, a few calculated, innocent-looking movements from him and he's now close enough for your arms to brush, because you're not the only one who can't stand that sliver of air between both of you.

Because he's chafing against the same shackles, your beautiful boy.

(It's not like you agreed to these shackles easily, it's not like you didn't suspect it would get harder. But he didn't suspect – he _knew._ He's smart, your beautiful boy, smarter than you, because when you were both advised long ago that it would get easier with time, easier and easier, until bowing to the charade became second nature, he yelled _no,_ intelligent eyes flashing in rage that you foolishly tried to calm down. Turns out he was right. He was right, and everyone else was wrong, and still he holds you and murmurs that it was not your fault, reminds you that it's the same filthy world for everyone else, even those whose lives are completely removed from yours, the A-listers with household names and limos and fleets of bodyguards; _how could you have known,_ he says, and you couldn't, but then how did he know to say no?)

His eyes seek you out more and more often as he gets up and sits back down and runs a hand through his hair and acts out an anecdote, peppering your shoulder and your arm and your back and your thigh with feather-light touches at the flimsiest of pretexts, while you marshal every dreg of self-control to keep your hands to yourself.

 _Forbidden._ It's not hard to keep your grumpy smile intact as the ugly word flashes nonstop before your eyes, an outrageous, unacceptable line keeping your beautiful boy, _your_ boy, from you. A line you could never have imagined you wouldn't be able to afford to break (the livelihoods of hundreds, of your friends, the future of your kids) all those years ago, fresh and drunk on love and success and so, so naïve.

A warm, precious arm on your shoulder. Your very blood is singing dizzyingly hot with the need to touch, to _claim,_ but you don't dare return his touch. All you can do is lean towards him in hastily concealed eagerness, heart hammering and face schooled into fond grumpiness. He can pull off those butterfly-light touches; you can't.

If _you_ touch him, you won't be able to stop.

His name. You grasp at the first flimsy excuse your banter allows to say it. _Jared,_ you say only once, a secret caress. It still astounds you that his name from your mouth doesn't expose the entire charade for what it is, but nobody's the wiser. And it's an indescribable thrill, with nobody the wiser, to let his name fall obscenely out of your mouth, watch his eyes darken now like they did the last time you gasped his name against his skin and kissed it into his mouth, _Jared Jared Jared._

Jesus Christ.

You wonder if you're as exposed as you feel, sitting there powerless to stop your grumpy face slipping into a startled chuckle you didn't even see coming (he knows how to crack you up like nobody else). He beams proudly at you, his beautiful eyes dancing with joyful mirth, your laughter a sacred prize to this magnificent specimen of human being you cannot believe you get to call yours, punches the air in victory and knocks the air out of you with a flash of taut belly (sacred trail of hair, secret scent flooding your nose, elastic between your teeth as you peel it off him), and pulling your thighs together is now a lost cause.

Another glance from beneath a fringe of silk, exquisite cheekbones smudged pink, another coy glance away from your heat. _Jesus._ You fumble out a serious face from your bag of tricks. God. It has to be there for everyone to see. In the way your eyes are stuck on him and the way you can't stop swallowing convulsively, so turned on you want to eat him alive and so gone on him you ache to press a long kiss to the tip of that nose.

God. It has to be written all over your face.

More delighted squeals when he brushes those silken locks against your shoulder, savage protectiveness flaring up white-hot inside you. You lean towards him in starved relief at the touch, shoulders shaken out, instinctively half-shielding your beautiful boy as you hang on to the tatters of your trademark grumpiness, every cell in your body humming with want at each stolen touch from him.

It barely fortifies either of you. His dimples wink at you with every lovely smile he throws you, every lovely glance only stoking your fire, every move he makes sweet, cool water taunting your ever-burning thirst, and his touches get bolder as your eyes grow sloppier and sloppier.

He senses your hunger, and your gazes meet and hold this time, his Adam's apple jumping as you swallow around a parched throat. Heat dots his cheeks and neck again and threads into his smile under your predatory gaze, and the silk piled on his head tumbles slowly into those beautiful eyes and the shaken look in them, and Jesus Christ he's not even riling you up on purpose. Good luck to you keeping it together now, because if you were alone he would've been grabbed and kissed to within an inch of his life, and you have to touch him now, one tiny touch, anything, _Jesus_.

More feather-light grazes before he rests a palm on your bicep, this time on the pretext of getting your attention (as if it wasn't already desperately tangled in his very breath, as if the carefully practiced half-boredom, half-indifference in your eyes was real, as if you actually want to keep gazing at the ceiling and the floor and your shoes instead of a precious curl of soft silk around an ear, instead of pink lips no longer kiss-bruised from your mouth).

His hand is gone too soon. Your skin tingles with the heat his palm bled on your arm, and you have no defenses left and can only watch him outright as he flutters around you and jokes and talks up a storm and bares his heart to everyone and jumps on chairs and yanks your heart out of your mouth to trail after him, your body helplessly turned towards him, sharply attuned to him whichever way he turns.

Your awareness of the rest of the world, usually a blur compared to him, slams into focus as he approaches people and lets people approach, the astounding kindness you know so well spilling from his pores as he hugs and holds and smiles and tries to soothe pain and drive away demons he only knows too well. Your eyes covertly scan and evaluate, straining to weed out any danger near him, your mind slithering with ugly visions of punches and bites and stabs and every unhinged attack you know of.

None of that. Just love, so much love showered on him and still nowhere near the love he deserves. Your jaw clenches and unclenches while he keeps baring his heart under your watchful eye. He's maddeningly, dangerously genuine, point-blank refusing to even consider the age-old advice you've made your mantra – _you have to stay an enigma_ , a mentor said long ago, _you can stay grounded and humble behind your walls, but people see you on the street and want to touch your fingertips, fall at your feet; you're no longer a regular human being to them, and don't you dare rob them of that._

(But he looked at you with clear, intelligent eyes and said, _I can't,_ plain and simple. In the bowels of this ugly, ugly world you're both trapped in, this world of painstakingly practiced trademark laughs compared and commended, fake personas and deliberate "natural" gait and endearing anecdotes from childhood memories that never happened, he's the outsider, your beautiful boy who flutters through it all and leaves kind words and encouraging smiles in his wake but will have none of it, soars above it all, clean and genuine like only you know he is.)

Worry is bitter in your mouth as he mingles and hugs and consoles and smiles and leaves precious little pieces of himself with everyone. In spite of the love he's engulfed with, you'd snatch those pieces all back and guard them jealously in your heart if you could. He's only human, your beautiful boy, just one, fragile, _precious_ human, willingly trading pieces of himself for the dangerous pain of hundreds.

You know now that it's not free – pain latches onto pain and feeds on pain, and the pain lurking poisonous in his blood will feast on this. All you can do is be there so you can gladly patch him up with pieces of yourself, until they sprout inside him and he's whole again in your arms.

 _Because it helps,_ he tells you when you ask why he seeks out so much pain, _dividing the pain; it's just math._ On the bad days when the demons wake up and dig poisoned claws into him and he can't find it in himself to move and he stills seeks out more pain. _Not pain,_ he corrects you, kind and quiet. _They made it in spite of this poison we all share. If they can do it, maybe I can too. Someone else who thinks there's no hope might find this and know they can make it too._

And then _, don't you see,_ he says in the dark, hushed voice and closed eyes, talking softly as if you're the one in sore need of gentleness and reassurance, _I owe them; I owe everyone: I got you,_ and your heart shatters _,_ because your beautiful boy thinks he's the one who won the lottery here.

And yet you sense the toll it's taking on him even before his eyes latch onto yours. Your precious angel is shaken down to his beautiful toes and trying valiantly to keep it together, his gaze finding you, the smile on his lips a loud, silent screech only you can hear, and you take over.

You have everyone in fits as your mouth babbles and you perform and joke and dance and keep your gaze on him for most of it, his eyes blazing with an ache for solace in your arms only equal to the hunger in your very bones to reassure and anchor him, this beautiful vision of a boy who was _made_ for you-

-because if there's one thing in the world that rivals your desperate, starved need to claim him and leave your mark on him and keep your hands on him, to constantly indulge him and spoil him and ply him with sweet words and treats and watch him shine under your gaze, _for_ you, while you can't see anything else, to grab him to you the moment you're behind closed doors and swallow the startled, happy squeak from his mouth and make him _yours,_ over and over and over, until his sweet, sweet lips are swollen with your love and his sun-kissed skin has your smell inside every pore, roughened and red from your stubble and your fingernails and your teeth-

-oh, if there's one thing that rivals this crazed need inside you to claim, own, possess-

-it's _his_ equally desperate need to be claimed, owned, possessed by you, to have your gaze on him every waking second, to coax laughter out of you with his puppyish boyishness and the bad puns he knows you enjoy even more than he does, to be grabbed and kissed and pinned and taken by you, _owned_ by you over and over and over until his beautiful eyes are dark and lost and he's a puddle of melted boy underneath you-

-because the hunger humming feverish and predatory in your blood to claim him _mine, mine, mine_ is only matched by the beseeching look in his eyes that begs _yours, yours, make me yours._

Yes, he was made for you, this beautiful boy who's wrapping his arms around you now, and the roaring in your ears drowns out the fresh chorus of delighted laughter as he leans further into you, drapes himself all over your side and back, fluid grace and irresistible scent suffusing your senses, his precious head hidden in the nape of your neck while you both soak up the closeness for one sweet, sweet moment as you hide behind your closed eyelids, the only way to keep your tired grumpiness firmly in place now.

Just a semblance of a hug from _you_ and he's already calming down, your beautiful boy, as he flits away yet again, gracing you with a lovely smile, still shaken but genuine, and every cell in your body is screaming _enough_ to the charade, your guts twisting at his pain, your palms aching to grab him and claw reassurance into his skin, your boy, _made_ for you-

-because it's in the way your entire being hums _my baby boy_ at his boyish smile, and it's in the way he murmurs _so sue me for wanting to take a walk with my man_ that has you clambering to your feet no matter how exhausted you are-

-because when your urgent heat burns so hot you don't know what to do with yourself, and you grab his precious head and eat at his mouth, insatiable with this crazed possessiveness you never even _knew_ existed in your very bones before you met him and fell hard and fell for life-

-and when you drop to your knees right before another façade and slide him into your mouth and swallow and swallow and refuse to wash the taste out of your mouth, when you stop him before you face the outside world and snarl _mine_ into his mouth and steal his chewing gum, sweet with his spit into your mouth, a secret solace for the torture of being forbidden to claim him, of watching somebody else's hands on him, somebody else's eyes lighting up with something you cannot bear to think of-

-he gladly welcomes your animal need, answers your rush with exquisite surrender as he melts against you and underneath you and around you as if to smother himself in your skin and your spit, this boy who was _made_ for you.

Soon. You keep the promise blazing in your eyes and wait for him to meet your gaze, because it's almost over. You let your hand creep up his sleeve, curl around his shoulder. He goes immediately pliant, turning into your touch with his entire body and you barely bite back a growl at the dizzying wave of possessiveness rushing through you.

You won't be able to let go now that you've touched him, but that's okay. There's the pretext of steering him out as you prepare to leave. You'll be able to quench a tiny bit of the ache in the car, your hand proprietary and hot around his slender wrist, his hand open in sublime surrender to you. You'll see your hunger reflected in his beautiful eyes and you'll tuck him next to you as close as tinted car windows allow…

…until you're finally, _finally_ behind closed doors and you can fall on him and not hold back, until your feverish need to eat him alive sinks its teeth into his wounded need to be eaten alive, and you no longer know where you end and he begins and you're both breathless and drunk on each other, _mine_ and _yours_ becoming one glorious _us_ and your terrible, all-consuming fire is dampened if only for a few moments and you can gather him in your arms, all baby-boy softness and rugged masculinity that weakens your knees, fragile like the spun sugar of a butterfly's wing and strong as a rock, this exquisite creature of amazing contradictions, a miracle that was _made_ for you.

Your palms ache, but that's okay.


End file.
